Indelible Ink

    They had to pull me out of class for it. It was the middle of the day, and we were listening as the teacher read from one of my favorite books, My Side of the Mountain, where a boy leaves his home to live alone in the woods, when the announcement came over the intercom.
    “Marc Timmons to the office please, Marc Timmons to the office.”
    I already knew before I got there. There were two wings of the school I had to walk down, long hallways that sloped slightly down. The tile, like most public schools, had been buffed so often it looked like glass, and each step I took was so heavy that I was sure cracks would spit from my feet at any second.     
    My father was waiting at the door of the little administrative office, a suitcase of my clothes held between his hands. His eyes were misty, and in his face I found the confirmation of the question raging in my mind: She was dead.
    
    It was a four hour drive, maybe more. The endless flatlands and vacant highways always made the trips seem longer than they are. I’d only been to Dillon a few times before. Strangely, my family on my father’s side was never very close, and we spent more time seeing and speaking with my mother’s side, even though they lived thousands of miles away in Germany.
    Dillon was very nearly a ghost town by the time I was born. Driving through its few streets you could almost imagine the picturesque place it might have been in the late fifties. Actually it was probably a hole back then too, maybe I just wished it was a nicer place so I could believe that once there had been something beautiful among the dilapidated houses and Out of Business signs.
    My grandmother lived on the edge of town in a two story house the color of pea soup. The paint was peeling and the front porch sagged, and every window had a thick film of age. I stayed upstairs, within the walls of my father’s childhood, and in the darkness when I was trying to shut my mind and fall asleep, I could hear the echoes of his youth.
    I saw the small beds appear in the tiny room, three of them in all placed as far apart as space would allow in the small bedroom. I saw John’s bigger bed, the one to accommodate his strenuous size and the mythical nature of a man I never met. I saw Lana’s smaller bed, with a hand made toy chest at the foot of her bed, and faded magazines hidden under the mattress that were filled with the faces of movie stars. And in the corner I saw my father’s bed. I saw the simplicity of what lied around it, the outcome of the derision of being a middle child. I saw the few trinkets he kept hidden away, ones that held more memory and sway that any photo album of scented letter, but more than anything I could feel the hope in that corner. The hope to escape this town, the hope to get so far away as to never have to remember the poverty and the horrible feeling of knowing your life doesn’t matter. And now, thirty five years later, that fire still lingered in the room, if only in smoldering embers.
    We spent the next day packing up the house. In her last years, my grandmother had become less and less able to take care of herself. The living room was piled high with more newspapers than my young eyes had ever seen. Six feet tall in some spots, hiding the tiny framed pictures on the wall with their girth. But near the front of the room, after a few does of Windex on the windows, enough light shone in to illuminate those photographs that I did remember, and told stories that filled in gaps I’m still trying to find.
    He played football, they told me. Was a good athlete and popular too, all the things I sometimes wished I had but was never given. I never saw what his mom looked like, but it was obvious from the picture that he inherited most of his looks from my dad. The warm, kind eyes, tight lipped smile, and impression that was trained to show flat joy when everything else was locked up underneath. I tried to remember him and the few times we spent together. I tried to make up stories about how we used to play together at the park on warm spring afternoons, and stayed so long that the shadows stretched out for miles and my parents would worry about where we’d gone to. But really I saw an alien figure in the picture, one marked by the darkness of his aftermath, and the wounds that don’t clot after a suicide.
    
    I didn’t go to the funeral. I would go to my great uncle’s a few months later, but not my grandmother’s. They wouldn’t let me go to see her at the hospital either, at least not in the last week or so when all the adults had the permanent look of worry and tiredness on their faces. I stayed home and wondered why all of them didn’t want me to “see here like that”. How different could Grandma have looked? There was a short time afterwards when I was convinced that cancer somehow turned you green and scaly, and they had to hide away the monster you became in special wards of hospitals where little boys weren’t allowed.
    The last couple days there were very strange. I met a lot of old men and women that said sorry a lot, and brought endless platters of food to fill my grandmother’s refrigerator. I ate three helpings of peach cobbler.
    We found old boxes with pictures of my grandfather, and I felt the same disconnect in his familiar face that I saw in my half-brother’s. A man who had died so long ago that my mother had never even met him.
    It felt hollowed out after we finished. I can imagine now that it must have been a truly horrific experience for my father, going back to this tiny house he’d run so far from, and having to box up the memories and keepsakes of a past that he could never quite escape.
    I spent an afternoon at a family friend’s house, getting to know my informal “cousins” while my parents were at the funeral home. Their house was a double wide trailer, with all the tidings of white trash taste and low-income amenities one would expect. They had a few kids, and as usual when adults are trying to do something more explicitly adult, we were lumped together and expected to get along. I flipped through the oldest boy’s baseball card collection and tried to pretend I knew who any of the players were.
    When we went back home, the ride was much faster as we sped away from a town that time had been malicious to. I was still trying to grasp what it all had meant. I hadn’t yet had a death in the family when I was old enough to comprehend it, and I was swimming in the confusion of it all. I didn’t have any questions about Grandma though; I never asked if she was in a better place or if I would see her again. No, what was strange to me was the way everyone else was acting after she was gone. How it turned into a regulated system of funeral arrangements, financial restitution, pitying conversations with family friends over watered down coffee and stale cake, and the enigmatic air of a house filled with a generation of memories that no longer had an owner.
    But in the week spent sleeping in my father‘s old bedroom and climbing up and down the steep, narrow staircase that his adolescent feet slammed upon, I took away a feeling understanding, even if I didn‘t know it then.
    Death was something that affected the living more than those who died, and it was those that went on breathing, not the ones dead, that had to come to terms with it.

Reviews

[DavidRyanM]

You're becoming masterful at writing about small snippets of life. Each story I've read recently makes me think about days I might have otherwise forgotten, or memories long hidden. Diggin' it man.